


Millionaire

by Unpretty



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: F/M, icarus and the sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-30
Updated: 2014-12-30
Packaged: 2018-03-04 08:59:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3061847
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Unpretty/pseuds/Unpretty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are so many things that he owes her, and Varrick has plans for how their first time is supposed to go. Zhu Li has no intention of waiting for her due.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Millionaire

Varrick didn't actually pass out after they landed. He thought he should be allowed to lay down for a little while after a traumatic experience, was all. Zhu Li disagreed, because when she saw him on the floor she practically panicked.

Upside: Zhu Li climbing on top of him. That was nice. Accidental, but he was willing to take credit for that.

"Varrick?" she said, and there was fear in her voice as her hands cupped his face, slender fingers and calloused palms. Well _that_ wouldn't do. He opened his eyes, and the relief that bloomed over her features was radiant. "Oh, thank _goodness_ ," she said, with a hitch in her voice as she curled on top of him, buried her face in his shoulder. Her thighs were straddling his waist and her breath was hot on his neck, and he was having a lot of conflicting feelings about the woman overwhelmed with emotions on top of him.

"Hey," he said, awkward, curling his hand around the back of her head. "It's okay, we're fine. Everything is _fine_."

Except for the explosions they could still hear in the distance, a fight that was no longer theirs. The abandoned building they had landed in seemed far enough away from the action that they probably wouldn't end up dead. Probably.

Things were much easier when he could pretend not to care about his assistant's feelings. He'd never had a fiancée before – not on purpose, anyway – but he was pretty sure he wouldn't be able to get away with that anymore.

She shook slightly on top of him, and it took a moment to realize that she was not sobbing, but laughing. Silent, shaking, half-mad laughter on his chest. "If you managed to _die_ ," she choked out, "right after you'd _finally_ said you loved me – I was going to be _so angry_." She pressed her lips to his neck, up and again towards his jaw, and he shivered. "If you die on me I am going to bring you back and I am going to kill you myself, Varrick, don't you dare don't you ever–"

He silenced her with a kiss, held her face in his hands and kissed her the way he hadn't on the train, the way he hadn't so many times before. He couldn't remember why, in retrospect, he hadn't. Kissing her was extremely useful. It stopped her from scolding him, for one thing. It gave him the very useful information that she'd had mint tea that morning. And the tiny moan she made against his mouth wound its way around his spine, hot and languid and sweet as honey.

Maybe that was why he hadn't kissed her. Because now he didn't know how he was going to stop.

"We should," he rasped, before trying to clear his throat. "We should try to get somewhere… safe…" She was pulling the tie from her hair and letting it all fall loose around her face, around _his_ face, and that was not making it easier to stop kissing her. It was doing the opposite of that. He tried to prop himself up on his elbows, but that just gave her an opening to wrap her arms around his shoulders, press herself against him in a way that made him groan. "We can't…"

She kept quieting his complaints with her mouth, hard and hungry, and somehow it was much less fair when she did it. If he kept kissing her, if she kept kissing him, he wasn't going to want to stop at kissing. That didn't seem right, the future Mrs. Varrick on the floor of some random building when she deserved better.

He didn't even know if he was her first. It was bad enough to think of her first time being anything but perfect, but if it was _his fault_ –

"We need to stop," he said, hands on her shoulders to try and hold her away, all that heat and that softness even though he wanted more. Her eyes were like silver, like platinum, like stormy skies over a deadly sea and they were wide and sad with her mouth all swollen from the force with which she'd been kissing him. "Not _here_ ," he said, because surely she'd understand now that he'd said it. A bed the size of a bedroom all covered in silk, down pillows and locked doors and soundproofed walls; _there_ , not _here_.

She craned her neck to press her forehead to his, and his eyes were trapped in hers, gazing at him above the lenses of her glasses. " _Please_ , sir?" she said breathlessly, and it took too long to realize that the incoherent sound was coming from his own throat.

That wasn't fair, she wasn't supposed to call him that now, she wasn't supposed to say it like _that_. It shouldn't have worked, he hated himself for the fact that it worked, fingers tangling in her hair so he could kiss her like it had been an order. Models and heiresses and farmer's daughters, and not one of them had ever said anything even remotely as sexy as that. She ground her hips against his, and he could feel the heat of her through both of their clothes, suddenly he was rolling to pin her beneath him on the floor.

Had she always been able to do this? Had she secretly spent years capable of turning him into a mindless idiot with nothing more than a few well-placed words? How had he ever thought that she might be plain, when she was clearly the most beautiful woman in the world?

"Whose idea was it to put this many buttons on these jackets?" he muttered as he tried to get hers undone, bending low to kiss her throat.

"Yours, sir," she laughed, and her laughter hummed against his lips. _Spirits,_ but when she called him that–

He was a bad, bad man.

He tugged and pulled at fabric with hands clumsier than usual, reveled in the sharp intake of breath as he exposed her breasts to the air. He was making a mess of this, making a mess of _her_ , still half-dressed with her clothes torn open just enough. "This isn't how this was supposed to go," he apologized, lowering himself to kiss the peak of one breast, draw the hardened bud into his mouth. She cried out, arched her back to press soft flesh harder against his lips.

"Have you been planning it long?" she teased, and he could hear her smiling, one of a million smiles he owed her.

"There should be rose petals," he insisted against her skin, kissing his way up her body so his hand could slide past her waistband. "Silk, and candles, and those weird oils that I never really liked but it's the _principle_ of the thing, Zhu Li." Fingers found the heat of her beneath her clothing, through damp curls to find the hard bud of her arousal, and her whole body arched as she made a high-pitched sound he'd never heard before. She hadn't even taken her glasses off, and that shouldn't have been as attractive as it was.

So many sounds he'd never heard her make and so many expressions he'd never seen on her face. She grabbed him by the hair to kiss him, urgent and not remotely gentle, and even that couldn't quiet her, already halfway to screaming. Because _of course_ Zhu Li would scream, _of course_ she would be utterly incapable of controlling herself, it all made perfect sense and he didn't know why he'd ever thought it would be otherwise. A finger slid inside her and curled, and she bucked against his hand so hard she almost knocked him over.

" _Sir_ ," she said, and she was pleading and scratching at his clothes, "please, _please_ –"

There would never have been time for rose petals, not ever when she could say things like that and have him growling like an animal. A sad little sound when his hand pulled away from her, but her protests died as he unfastened his trousers.

– _too many fucking buttons again, nothing but robes from this day forward, I will revolutionize the fucking fashion robe and never have to deal with this many buttons ever again_ –

Her fingers wrapped around his cock the instant it was free, and he shuddered with such force that his legs almost gave out, bit his tongue because if he didn't he'd finish in her hand like he was sixteen and desperate. Her hands, her _hands_ , they'd always been rougher than his own and it was one of many secret shames that on lonely nights his hands hadn't worked because they hadn't felt the way he'd known hers would.

A million secrets in the quiet of the room right next to hers, and he wondered if her hands had ever felt wrong to her in the dark.

" _Stop_ that," he snarled as his cock twitched in her hand, and that wasn't what he was supposed to say or how he was supposed to say it. She laughed and kissed him and didn't let him go, because of course she'd know better than anyone when he was all bark and no bite. He tugged her pants down over her hips, down her thighs as he pushed her knees to her chest and she was forced to let her fingers leave his shaft.

Half-dressed and bruised and sore in the wreckage of a city that was still falling apart, her hair smelled like smoke and her hands smelled like motor oil and he'd never wanted anything as much as he wanted her. Leather boots settled over his shoulders, and when he pushed inside of her she cried out and dug her heels into his back. Her hips tilted, lifted off the ground to try and align herself to him and push him deeper, and it was proving very difficult to keep any semblance of his wits about him.

_I love you I love you I love you_ and he realized he was saying it, chanting it like a prayer, and she was pressing her hands to the ground to arch her back higher. He was thrusting into her harder, faster, none of the gentleness or the sweetness he owed her because all he wanted was to claim her instead. He kissed her, their bodies a tangled mess as he moved, and when he should have said something romantic in the inches between them instead he said: " _Mine_."

Zhu Li, the only one he'd ever needed and the only one who could ever keep up, her fingers slid along his scalp and pulled him back down to kiss him again. She sucked his tongue into her mouth and she scraped her teeth against his lip, and he mourned for all the years they'd wasted pretending they were anything but this. " _Mine_ ," she growled in return, and he didn't know how he ever could have doubted it.

Quicker now, he was ramming his hips into hers with an urgency he'd never felt, until he felt her tense and tighten beneath and around him. " _Iknik_ ," she screamed, and that was his undoing, buried as deep as her body would allow as he came. Still twitching as she fell limp against the floor, and her contented sigh as he filled her was almost as good as the screaming had been.

He rolled off of her, and the two of them sprawled into a sweaty heap of ruined clothes and shaking limbs. At some point the explosions had stopped, and neither of them had noticed.

All his brilliant plans to love her the way she deserved, and instead he fucked her into the floor without even bothering to take his boots off first. He rubbed a hand over his face, trying to fight off drowsiness because this was neither the time nor the place. " _Ffffffuuuuck_ me." He really had done this entirely wrong.

"Again?" Zhu Li was snuggling up against him, hadn't bothered fixing any of the things he'd set into disarray, smelling like sex and looking terribly pleased with herself. He tousled her hair yet worse, and she giggled.

"Well I hope you're happy," he said, trying and failing to sound stern. "You have completely _ruined_ Operation: Romantic Interlude." She snorted a laugh, clearly unimpressed by the amount of thought he had put into it. "I am _very_ serious, Zhu Li, if any of this is going to be salvageable then until our wedding night we–"

" _Please_ , sir?" she purred into his ear again.

" _Hhnnnnnngh_ okay but give me at _least_ ten minutes first. Five minutes. Two minutes. No, I was right the first time, ten minutes."


End file.
